In the late autumn of the first year of high school, when the ginkgo leaves fluttered on Xu Nian's shoulders for the first time, she bumped into Zhou Ye, the boy with single eyelids and a high nose. Like a beam of unexpected light, it fell into her pupils.
The ginkgo tree at the back window of the classroom turns golden year by year. Xu Nian's textbook contains countless fallen leaf specimens, and each leaf vein is filled with silent thoughts. She chased his back through the morning reading playground and the evening self-study packed with test papers. She hid her goal of "passing math" in her eyes as she peeked at his problem solving. She folded her clumsy concerns into anonymous lozenges and stuffed them into his desk that was always piled with homework books.
Secret love is a person's chaos. She thought that those stops at the entrance of Ginkgo Alley and the names on the edge of the draft paper would eventually be scattered to pieces by the autumn wind. Until one late autumn evening, when the setting sun overlapped the shadows of the two of them in the golden ground, he suddenly turned around and brushed the falling ginkgo leaves in her hair with his fingertips: "Xu Nian, you always ask me if I like ginkgo - in fact, I have already fallen in love with the girl picking leaves under the ginkgo tree."
It turns out that in these turbulent years, someone turned love into growth rings. He was her sun on winter nights, and she finally waited. Ginkgo lived up to autumn, and he lived up to her.
"Zhou Ye, look, the ginkgo has turned yellow."
"No, it's the person I've been waiting for who finally stands in the light."
Purpose: The heroine Xu Nian hides her thoughts in ginkgo leaves, cares anonymously and other delicate actions to depict the purity and caution of secret love; the hero Zhou Ye's final affectionate response breaks the one-way silence and explains that sincerity and persistence can eventually allow secret love to grow. It conveys the warm power of two-way travel in youthful years, as well as the preciousness and beauty of sincere emotions accumulated by time.